SELECTINDEX

This statement will create a dynamic array of record keys based on a single selection of a single index key value. It is more efficient to use a combination of OPENINDEX and READNEXT statements rather than the SELECTINDEX, but this statement was included for compatibility with legacy applications.

COMMAND SYNTAX

SELECTINDEX index-name{,index-key} FROM file-var {TO select-var}

SYNTAX ELEMENTS

index-name must correspond to the name of a valid index created on the file that has been opened to the file descriptor file-var.
If index-key is specified it must correspond the the an indexed value within the index specified by index-name.
If select-var is specified it is used to hold the select list created by the SELECTINDEX statement.

NOTES

Given an opened file descriptor this statement will select all the record keys in this file, sorted by the index definition "index-name". An optional variable "index-key" can be used to restrict this selection to a single index key value. The value of "index-key" will be the raw value of the index data - no lookup code processing will be done on this value. For example if the index was created as a numeric field with a D2 lookup code, the values in "index-key" would be the numeric date (e.g. 13640) instead of the external representation (e.g. "05-MAY-2005").

EXAMPLE 1

If we assume a file called CUSTOMERS exists, and an index definition exists called NAME , then the following code will display all the record keys which have the name "SMITH". Note that the name must be exactly SMITH, a name such as SMITHY will not be included

filename = "CUSTOMERS"
OPEN filename TO filevar ELSE STOP 201,filename
SELECTINDEX "NAME","SMITH" FROM filevar TO smith.list
LOOP WHILE READNEXT KEY index.value,record.key FROM smith.list DO
CRT index.value,record.key
REPEAT

In the above example the variable "index.value" will always be returned as a "" string. This is because normal select lists only contain record keys and multi-value numbers. In the above example it would perhaps be more appropriate to use the following loop.

LOOP WHILE READNEXT record.key FROM smith.list DO
   CRT record.key
REPEAT

EXAMPLE 2

If you had an index on a date field, the following jBC code would be correct if you were looking for all records whose date is "23-July-1970".

SELECTINDEX "DATE" , ICONV("23-JULY-1970") TO LISTNAME
LOOP WHILE READNEXT record_key FROM LISTNAME DO ..

jBC